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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#641

Post by BoredPositron »

ricardobayes wrote: post #638
CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #55

I run a niche creative community, and we outlawed AI-generated content in 2022 as it was easy to see how corrosive it would be to the community. It hasn't been easy. We ban fake AI accounts daily and shrug off around 600 AI content creator accounts monthly. It's a lot of work, extra work that wasn't needed before AI content came around, and of course, that is an extra cost. I fear losing the battle.

I always find the most difficult is to deal with users who are not actively breaking any rules but are toxic and hurting the conversation. Given your experience, what's your take on handling this?

In my experience it's okay to have some troll or odd users. If they do targeted campaigns against single users or small groups we ban them.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#642

Post by rglullis »

account42 wrote: post #618
rglullis wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Charging money means you will also offset real humans at the same time. On completely different scales. Even if it not perfect, it is strong enough of a filter to turn a bot infestation into a mild annoyance.

That's an assumption. Depending on the incentives in play, the relative scale at which AI users and real humans are affected may well be the opposite of what you expect.

No, that's based on my experience running subscribers-only instances on the Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix, Funkwhale) for more than 6 years now. I might not have that many users on the servers, but it's certainly a higher number than the zero spammers I ever got.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#643

Post by lelanthran »

agustechbro wrote: post #18

I kind feel this might be good. Bot writen comments and AI media that can no longer be distinguish from real, will make us human leave the social networks, which helped to separate Us humans. Going back to the real world were you can trully believe on what you see, and enjoy the tone, look and scent of of our fellows humans beings.

> Bot writen comments and AI media that can no longer be distinguish from real, will make us human leave the social networks,

These are professional skinner box designers; real people will remain on, even if the site themselves have to use chatbots to keep them there.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#644

Post by poly2it »

AdminAccount wrote: post #574

I think the only reason stackoverflow still has any activity is because the community choose to ban AI content [1] and so did most of its other networks [2]. Perhaps it will even see a (small) resurgence when AI providers start charging for the actual costs. [1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831 [2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/384922

I keep hearing that AI providers will eventually stop "subsidising inference", but I do not understand how this would make any sense economically. It is already profitable to host AI model inference for prices cheaper than the big labs are charging, as evident by the plethora of providers available to choose from on OpenRouter, for example. The only way prices could rise without competition is if you sidestepped supply and demand.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#645

Post by lelanthran »

layer8 wrote: post #186
agustechbro wrote: post #18

I kind feel this might be good. Bot writen comments and AI media that can no longer be distinguish from real, will make us human leave the social networks, which helped to separate Us humans. Going back to the real world were you can trully believe on what you see, and enjoy the tone, look and scent of of our fellows humans beings.

If it can no longer be distinguished from real, why would it make people leave?

If AI can't be distinguished from real people, why would real people stay? If they want to talk to AI bots, they can do so without joining a "community".

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#646

Post by Forgeties79 »

jayd16 wrote: post #81
Forgeties79 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Don't do it anywhere. He's a jerk for doing it on reddit.

Can’t make it worse than Huffman already has. After the API nonsense most mods who are still there should’ve left. I don’t know how most continue to do Reddit’s work for free after the way Huffman talked about us all. He made it clear how much he despises the community and the complete lack of respect he has for the people who run all the subs

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#647

Post by puika »

ramon156 wrote: post #595

Instagram comments genuinely make me angry. It used to be because the comments lacked any critical thinking. This is probably due to the fact that most people on instagram are teenagers. That's fine, and for that reason I stopped reading comments. But now it's pretty obvious that the comments are LLMs talking. Whether a human initiated it, no idea, but the big walls of text done by bobbyfoo2012 seems highly unlikely.

I'd say LinkedIn is on a whole other level. Steer clear of it for your own health

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#648

Post by alaudet »

danaris wrote: post #565
alaudet wrote: post #307

The balance is so far out of whack with LLM's now in online communities. People crave human interaction with like minded individuals, and whoever figures out how to give authentic online experiences is going to be successful. Maybe small communities need to come back, where you build credibility slowly. Why does every site have to be a monstrosity that wants to build a hundred million users to IPO. It just attracts t…

> whoever figures out how to give authentic online experiences is going to be successful The problem is, there is fundamentally no way to scale this. The only way to give authentic human interaction with like-minded individuals is to connect real humans to other real humans who share interests. And as we've already seen over the first few ages of the Internet, once such a community scales past a certain size, it a) c…

Scaling is a problem. But my mind keeps running in circles as to how you could do this. Maybe organically through a "web of trust" like gpg. Bob trusts Alice --> Alice trusts John, so Bob automatically trusts John. But then the complexity would kill it just like gpg and you would be sitting alone in your group chat.

Maybe if Alice gets out of line and starts trusting obvious bot accounts you can untrust her and automatically would remove any replies from the people she trusts.

Just having fun here.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#649

Post by WillAdams »

agustechbro wrote: post #18

I kind feel this might be good. Bot writen comments and AI media that can no longer be distinguish from real, will make us human leave the social networks, which helped to separate Us humans. Going back to the real world were you can trully believe on what you see, and enjoy the tone, look and scent of of our fellows humans beings.

The problem of course, is what about folks who have very specific interests/hobbies?

It's a long drive for me to get to a local shop and things which I am actually interested in working on rarely show up in the classes and so forth which they offer, and scheduling is awkward --- when my second favourite author came up on rotation for the book discussion at the local Barnes & Noble, I wasn't able to attend due to a prior commitment w/ my kids.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#650

Post by liminis »

Havoc wrote: post #193
liminis wrote: post #124

I'll remove the particulars to avoid anything partisan, but: I failed to truly appreciate how cooked reddit was with bots until I accidentally clicked Popular and stumbled upon a national subreddit post with a 'chad meme', starring a particular political leader, whose unpopularity is hard to adequately convey to foreigners. It was not just that this post had been so severely upvoted, but the comment section itself ha…

>I failed to truly appreciate how cooked reddit was with bots until I accidentally clicked For me it was a wholesome response. It seemed genuinely kind/human. Click on user profile...it's a bot just pumping out posts like that. Looked organic when seen in isolation, but when you see a wall of them you see that it's got to be an LLM (with a good prompt). That was disheartening...I had kinda accepted that the sht-stirr…

That's a bit miserable ... ; - ;

I try to avoid the place where I can. The only places I check with any regularity are niche, like r/roguelikes, or r/ironscape; I think they escape the worst of it as a result. I'm sure the bot stats on twitter would be even scarier though, and there's no real escape from the noise there.

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